LL: Look!  I'm not dead!

B0b: (muttering) Pity.

LL: Wow.  It's been nearly four months or so since I've written anything. *cringes* Umm, what can I say, but I really have been extraordinarily busy.

B0b: Dazzling them with your pitiful spelling of big words isn't going to help you, I'm afraid.  Just read them your list of excuses and get it over with.

LL: *thwacks B0b with a huge blow-up hammer* Well, I got swamped with the end of school, final's and AP's and all that lovely stuff.  Then, I had about a week of summer before I started summer school since I am a masochist and decided to graduate early.  But… no more high school for me!!  And then, I moved, and that took up another two weeks just to get here and recover.  I just had to share that with all you lovely people out there.  I love you all, really I do.

J0rge: *snacking on an ice-cream sundae* Honestly, I don't know why you bother.  No body reads these a/n's anyway.  They're just going to go straight to the fic and then grumble because you only gave them one new chappy.

LL: But, I've already started to work on the next one, honest!!

B0b: Just shut up so that these poor people can read the fic.

Disclaimer: Hell, if I owned GW, I wouldn't bother going to college.

Prologue: Wufei

Wufei felt ill.

It wasn't the nearly healed scar on his chest that was giving him trouble.  Nor was it the one on his arm, that had, in effect, caused the other.

He glared at his computer, as if destroying the machine could make the information that it had just revealed disappear.

Upon coming back from trouncing a few local bullies who thought they could scare him into paying 'security' money, the Chinese boy found him computer blinking innocently at him, much as it was doing now.  For a bearer of bad news, it sure wasn't afraid of getting smashed.

Before leaving, he had set the computer up to scan through a message that his former partner in Preventers, Sally Po, had sent Lady Une a few days ago.  To be precise, the message was a SOS.  Her mission had been simple.  Being a lot more diplomatic than most Preventers, Wufei included, Sally had been sent to calm down a few colonists who were worried that the local Preventers branch would become militaristic and attempt to take over.  After a three-day silence, unusual for Sally, this SOS came through, so garbled and full of static that the only thing that could be made out was that she was knee-deep in shit, to put it mildly.  The computer program that he had set up was intended to hack through the static to see if anything else had gotten through.  The results told him three things.

One: that the static was not the result of a bad connection.  It was manufactured, layers and layers of it to hide the part of the mission report that could do some good to anyone coming after Sally.

Two: Sally had been betrayed by someone within the Preventers organization and as a result had been captured by a group of belligerent mercenaries that inhabited this colony.

Thirdly, it told Wufei her exact location.

The former pilot sat back, digesting what he had found.  Sally, who had been his friend and mentor from the time he had first met her, had been captured.  It wasn't particularly inconceivable, just not something that he had ever thought of.  After all, he had always figured that he would be there to guard her back.

That was before he had run away from the Preventers.

Sally.  She had always been there for him.  No matter how much he yelled, or tired to push her away.  She would not leave him to face his failures alone, even from the beginning.  She brought him lunch on those extra busy days when he forgot to eat.  Dragged him to movies so that he would not stay cooped up in his apartment on his days off.  At first he resented the way that she treated him; he felt that she thought of him as a child who couldn't take care of himself.  Then, he realized that she only wanted to be his friend.  After that, he stopped grumbling about going with her to a movie (unless it was a romance), and a time or two, even brought her lunch for a change.

Sally, the woman who would have sacrificed herself to 'heal his heart', had been captured, maybe even dead for all he knew.

Wufei only had one small word for the shit-faced god that enjoyed toying with his life: why?

*^*^*^*^*

Why turned out to be a very good question, as Wufei soon found out.  Now that he had Sally's full report, the former pilot was reluctant to go to Preventer headquarters.  So instead, he was forced to stay in his cramped up hotel room to see if he could hack into the colonies records.

From what he found, the particular group of mercenaries that were holding Sally hostage had occupied this colony since well before the war.  Other than a few charges of drunk-and-disorderly, the local police had no problems with the group.  The known members held no steady jobs, but would do almost anything for the right amount of money.  No one had ever complained about any harassment by members of the group, but Wufei had to wonder if this was because they were too afraid to do so.

All of this aside, Nataku's pilot could find no real reason for them to attack Sally.  Or even fake a group of disgruntled colonists in order to lure her here, as Wufei was beginning to suspect.  So he was brought back to his original question: why?

A sharp ring cut into his thoughts.

Fishing around for his cell, Wufei managed to answer by the third ring.  It was Lady Une.

"You haven't reported in yet," she said by way of a greeting.

He told her what he'd found.

A pause.  Then, a quiet but firm, "Find her Wufei.  No matter what it takes, find her."

"That's exactly what I intend to do."

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